Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery)

by G. M. Ford

  I awoke sitting up, sweating like a racehorse. Took me a half a minute to realize I’d been dreaming. The bedside clock read two-fifty-nine, and since there was no way I was going back to sleep anytime soon, I pulled my robe from the hook on the back of the door, and wandered into the kitchen.

  After I made coffee, I scrounged around and found a container of milk in the door of the fridge. When I peeked inside, the former milk appeared to be waving back at me, so I rummaged through one of the lower cabinets and came up with a jar of Coffee-mate so old it had originally belonged to my father, and he’d been dead for a couple of decades. Stuff had a half-life of six thousand years.

  Most of the way through the coffee, I was trying to work up a reasonable scenario wherein Rebecca could still be out there somewhere, but hard as I tried, I couldn’t put anything feasible together. I told myself not to panic, that I’d figure it out, that I’d find her if I just had a couple more pieces of the puzzle. That’s what I told myself.

  I was about to start over when my eyes came to rest on the Flip cameras and the collection of DVDs fanned across the table like a sliced tomato. I wondered once again, what kind of man feels a need to secretly film his lovers. Wondered if somewhere in Brett’s little mind he found leching at the digital images somehow more exciting than the sex acts themselves, as if a life lived in the third person held greater appeal to him than simple reality.

  I refreshed my coffee, rounded up the cameras and DVDs, and headed for the study. It used to be my old man’s office, the inner sanctum from which many a shady deal was hatched, and from which I had been barred right up until the day he died, which probably explains why, even before moving in, I’d had the room razed and renovated. New glass desk in the corner, coupla couches, coupla chairs, and a TV the size of Nova Scotia. If I’d left the office as it was, I’d have seen him sitting there, glowering at me from behind his desk for all eternity. Way I saw it, it was either make it my own, or nail the door shut and forget about it.

  As I fired up the TV and refreshed my memory of how to operate the DVD player, I realized that something inside me didn’t much want to see what was on these discs, that I was embarrassed to be peeping into the private parts of people’s lives…to coin a particularly unfortunate phrase.

  I figured I could skip the Rosemary De Carlo show, so I slid the disc labeled Serena A out of the middle of the pack and popped it into the DVD player. Time and date in the upper corners. March fifth a year and a half earlier. Eleven-oh-nine in the morning.

  Serena A was a good-looking blonde woman, getting a bit flanky in middle age, but I felt pretty sure it didn’t matter to Brett. From what I could see, Brett Ward was an equal opportunity adulterer. Big, small, old, young, six to sixty, blind, crippled, or crazy, it was all grist for ol’ Brett’s mill.

  Despite profound trepidations, I settled into my football chair. Right from the start, I could tell that the sounds were going to bother me more than the images. Maybe it was because Brett liked to talk dirty and made it a point to get his partners doing likewise, or, more likely, because there was something inherently more revealing about what came out of a person’s mouth than there was about what went in.

  Nonetheless, I resisted the strong impulse to hit the mute button.

  What I noticed right away was that there was a definite pattern to his sexual conquests. He more or less performed the same acts, in the same order, regardless of who was naked in the room with him, as if he was directing a fantasy movie in his head and all he did was recast the female lead whenever he took a new lover.

  Brett liked to do the undressing for the both of them. His eyes shone like a kid on Christmas morning, unbuttoning this, unsnapping that, peeling it away, fondling the foundlings, apparently without regard to size, shape, or degree of lividity. I reckoned how it was always a pleasure to see a man enjoying his work.

  Once he got ’em naked and suitably pinched, Brett became living proof that Oscar Wilde had been right when he’d opined that everything in the world was about sex, except sex, which was about power. What seemed to titillate Brett Ward was pushing each woman a couple of notches beyond her comfort zone. With the shy, it was just verbal. Getting them to beg for it with such prosaic entreaties as, “Give it to me. Give it to me”—or, my personal favorite, uttered five months back by one Amy T, “Oh God, use me like an animal.” I don’t know why, but plowing came immediately to my mind.

  With the more sexually adventurous, things took a significantly darker tone, as Brett seemed to be fixated upon getting the women to perform some sexual act they found abhorrent, the more painful and the more humiliating the better, as if their shame and discomfort somehow validated him. I found it difficult to watch but nonetheless managed to persevere.

  I suppose it was predictable that I would know one of the women on the DVDs. I was three discs into the carnal cavalcade when up popped Hillary Franks, one of Rebecca’s oldest and dearest friends, splaying herself like a honeydew melon, exposing parts of herself theretofore observed only by certified medical professionals.

  Not to belabor the Oscar Wilde thing, but I’m pretty sure he also said something to the effect that a friend is the one who stabs you in the front, which, as sad as it sounds, may be all we can reasonably expect from one another these days.

  The times and dates on the DVDs suggested Brett took a new lover about every three months or so. His most recent conquest was still in the camera’s memory, so I had to move over to the desk and watch it on my computer. Eleven days ago. Four thirty in the afternoon. Barbara P. A well-tended brunette in her early fifties. She’d shaved her pubic hair into the shape of a heart. She lay spread-eagled, tied to the bed with a red ball gag stuffed between her jaws and a pair of old-fashioned clothespins pinching her nipples. Looked like it smarted.

  Part of me wanted to laugh out loud at the sight of this pampered matron bound and gagged for pleasure. Another, better part of me recited the old “different strokes for different folks” mantra, and turned off the camera.

  I jumped at the sound of the newspaper hitting the front door, blinked a couple of times, looked around, and noticed gray daylight creeping through the office windows. I yawned, rolled my shoulders, and pushed myself to my feet.

  I reached to shut down the iMac but changed my mind and instead opened YouTube and typed the name Jordan Koontz into the search box.

  Like I figured, he wasn’t hard to find. His greatest hit, six years ago. Four million, three hundred sixty-three thousand, five hundred and nine hits later. I clicked Play and the screen blinked to life. Between rounds at a mixed martial arts fight. McMahon Stadium, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Jordan “The Terminator” Koontz versus Billy “The Wolfman” Czyz. The camera followed a lithesome young woman in a red bikini as she paraded around the perimeter of the octagon, holding a red number three above her head to signify the round.

  Only after she blew a kiss to the cameraman and returned to her ringside seat did the fighters come into view. Koontz was sitting on a stool in the blue corner, looking like he hadn’t blinked in the past hour and a half. He was sweaty, and his blond spikes were plastered to his head, but otherwise he was relatively unmarked.

  His opponent, on the other hand, looked like he’d been hit by a truck and dragged for several blocks. A cut man was applying cold steel to a hideously swollen area above the fighter’s right eye, while his trainer exhorted the fighter in some Central European language, and a third guy poured bottled water over his man’s head.

  My first thought was that I couldn’t believe the referee was going to let this guy come out for another round. He looked to have been threshed and baled. But, after conferring at some length with the ringside doctor, the referee waved the fighters from their corners, and the fight resumed.

  Thirty-seven seconds into the third round, the fighters launched themselves at one another at precisely the same instant. Their heads came together with a sickening crack.

  Czyz’s forehead smashed into the front of Koontz’s
face, sending both men reeling.

  I don’t watch enough mixed martial arts to qualify as an expert, but I knew for certain that head butts aren’t allowed. To me, this particular butt had appeared to be an accident, the kind of thing that often happens when highly conditioned men come together in the ring for the purpose of beating the bejesus out of one another. Jordan Koontz, however, didn’t see it that way. He pawed at his flattened face in disbelief and when his hand came away bloody, he went completely berserk.

  The referee was busy warning Czyz that any further head butts would result in the stoppage of the fight, so he never saw Koontz coming.

  Koontz threw the ref aside like he was made of Styrofoam, sent him staggering across the octagon, where he lost his balance and fell to his knees. Before the official could recover, Koontz drove a side-kick into his startled opponent’s middle, doubling him over, bouncing him off the ropes and down onto the mat.

  After that, it got hard to watch. Whoever had posted this version of the fight had slowed things down at the moment of impact. Czyz was on all fours when Jordan Koontz’s foot made impact with the back of his neck.

  The result was horrific. You could see the hail of sweat and spittle dislodged from Czyz’s head at the moment of impact. Watched as his mouthpiece flew out into the stands. Took everything I had not to put my hands over my eyes, as frame by frame, whatever collections of muscles and nerves and bones and sinew that held our heads upright became completely detached from their moorings.

  And then…then Czyz died, right before my eyes. Right there on the screen, super-slow motion, high definition dead, as whatever spark, cosmic or otherwise, that animates a human being left his body. I knew it; everybody in the arena knew it. Dead.

  Koontz, however, didn’t seem to notice. He continued his wild-eyed effort to stomp his opponent’s head flat, until the referee, having regained his footing, tried to throw himself onto Koontz’s back. Unfortunately, Koontz saw him coming.

  Koontz caught the ref in mid-stride, threw an arm between his legs, and lifted the poor guy completely over his head. Every lung in the area froze for a second as Koontz drove the referee headfirst into the mat.

  What followed was a melee of epic proportions, as dozens of people threw themselves into the fray, trying to rescue the fighter or the referee or one another; it was hard to tell. Mostly it was just a flailing, churning ball of humanity.

  I watched in stunned silence as medical personnel finally fought their way into the center of the octagon and began administering aid.

  Koontz had to be subdued and then sedated before he could be strapped to a gurney and wheeled from the venue, with the threats and curses of the crowd raining down on him. At that point, somebody got smart and shut down the camera feed.

  I sat back in the chair and took several deep breaths. My phone began to vibrate against the hard surface of the desk and, grateful for something—anything—that would help me push those pictures from my mind, I picked it up.

  Marty had managed to promote a cup of coffee from the Mickey D’s across the street, which meant he’d been on the scene for quite some time. He had his ears hunkered down inside his collar as he walked my way. He looked cold.

  “You wanna have a look before they haul it off?” he asked.

  I said I did.

  “I spoke with PE,” he said, referring to the Parking Enforcement Division of the SPD. “There were four tickets on the windshield and another two in the glove box,” he said. “They say it’s been here five days. The three officers who do the sweeps down here say they gave her a free ride for a couple of nights.” He shrugged, as if to dismiss their largesse. “They figured they’d already written her up four times, you know, maybe enough was enough.”

  “Remarkable restraint,” I commented.

  “To protect and serve.”

  “I don’t get how two of the tickets got in the glove box,” I said as we walked.

  “Not from around here,” Marty said. “They were issued early last week over in Wallingford, two days apart.”

  Rebecca’s green BMW X3 was angled into a spot directly beneath the southbound lanes of the viaduct. Two guys from Liberty Towing were hooking it up to the inclined bed of their truck as we approached.

  They waited patiently as I opened all the doors and poked around inside the car for quite some time. I don’t know what I was expecting to find, maybe just a sense of Rebecca clinging to the carpets or the headliner or something. It was weird, but I just had to do it.

  Marty read my mind. “Forensics is gonna give it a full go,” he assured me.

  “Where in Wallingford?” I asked.

  “On Eastern,” he said. “Between Forty-second and Forty-third.”

  I closed my eyes and pictured the neighborhood. Nice area. A mixture of older Victorians and postwar craftsman cottages. One of those narrow-street neighborhoods that was built before the automobile ruled the world. No driveways. If you met somebody coming the other way on Eastern Avenue, one of you had to duck in among the parked cars to let the other guy pass. Strictly single-family residential. No commercial activity of any kind. Nothing to hint at why her car had been illegally parked in that part of town.

  “Harbor Patrol swept that area of the Duwamish Waterway behind Saint David’s Transport. Came up empty.”

  “What about those freaks in the Cadillac?”

  “What about ’em?”

  “Aren’t you going to pick ’em up?”

  He shrugged. “No probable cause,” he said.

  “What about the assault on the security guard? That ought to be enough to get ’em in and at least sweat ’em a bit.”

  “As of a couple of hours ago, the security guard doesn’t remember a damn thing. All he recalls is waking up on the lawn with a broken face. The docs say it’s a fairly common reaction to a severe concussion.”

  “I saw it happen.”

  “You want to spend your day giving depositions?” he asked. “They’ll bail out and be back on the streets in under an hour. You know it, and I know it, and they know it.” He wiped the idea away with his free hand. “No point to it.”

  The whine of the tow truck ricocheted among the concrete pillars as they pulled the Beemer onto the bed of the truck and began to chain it down “I also called a colleague on the Vancouver PD. About ST Emtman and Saint David’s Transport.”

  “And?”

  “They’re expecting us for lunch,” Marty said.

  I winced. The trip to Vancouver, BC, was a 180 miles door-to-door, and that didn’t account for the border crossing, which could take another hour and a half to four hours depending on the volume of traffic, the current level of terror alert, and how well the countries were getting along at that moment. Pangs of dread were churning my insides to pudding and the idea of spending a whole day traveling back and forth to Canada just didn’t sound like time well spent.

  “That’s gonna kill the whole day,” I groused.

  He shrugged. “They didn’t want to talk about it over the phone.”

  I didn’t say so, but something inside me didn’t want to get that far from Seattle. I felt like I was giving up the hunt or deserting my post or something.

  Marty sensed my discomfort. He jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Everything points in that direction, Leo,” he insisted. “If there was anything else to do here in Seattle, I’d be doing it.”

  I wanted to argue, but Marty was right. Whatever had turned Brett Ward’s life upside down had originated up in B.C. Everything from the license plates to the shootout with the Provincial Police that heralded the beginning of the end of Brett’s boat repo business. All of it started in Canada.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “I’ll drive.”

  Looked like a Canadian cop convention. Multiple plainclothes officers represented the Provincial Police, the Vancouver PD and the RCMP. Another six uniformed constables lined the walls. Inspector Anthony Hargress of the VPD handled the introductions. Marty and I shook hands all around, sat do
wn at the foot of the table, and got our notebooks out.

  Hargress looked like he didn’t get out much. Fifty-something, losing sight of his belt buckle and his hairline at the same time. Poster boy for the Pacific Northwest pallor, that cadaveric hue one gets from living where the sun is, at best, an infrequent visitor.

  “ST Emtman and Saint David’s Transport are part of Billy Bailey’s far-flung empire,” Hargress began. An angry murmur crawled around the room. Hargress looked at Marty and me. “Which, in case you were wondering, explains the unusual level of interest in this room today.”

  As a matter of fact, I had wondered about that very thing the moment we’d walked through the door. Either it was a slow crime day in B.C. or Marty’s interagency request for information on Saint David’s Transport and ST Emtman had touched an unanticipated nerve within the Canadian law enforcement community.

  The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. “Billy Bailey?” I said.

  “Billy Bud,” growled the Mountie on my right.

  “Ah,” I said. “Not the Melville character, I take it?”

  Apparently my comic renown had once again failed to precede me.

  Hargress cleared his throat. “For the benefit of our guests…” he began in a tone that reminded me of an annoyed schoolmaster forced to repeat himself.

  Billy Bailey, or more formally, William Somerset Bailey III, would go down in history as Canada’s most famous and certainly most successful drug trafficker. Billy Bud, as he came to be known, parlayed a small-time pot-growing operation into an international pot-smuggling cartel that supplied major portions of the weed consumed on the West Coast of the United States. Thousands of tons of B.C. bud flowed over the US border and, much to their collective chagrin, nobody on either side of the border seemed to be able to do much about it.

  Billy was beyond slick. He understood how to keep his business at a distance. Over the years Canadian and American authorities had arrested an army of mules and seized tons and tons of pot, even taken down some of the movers and shakers within the organization, but had never gotten close enough to Billy to make a collar.